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Edward Jay Epstein, an iconoclastic writer whose deeply researched books challenged standard knowledge about controversies starting from whether or not John F. Kennedy was killed by a lone murderer as to whether the whistle-blower Edward Snowden was actually a Russian spy, has died in Manhattan. He was 88.
The trigger was issues of Covid, his nephew Richard Nessel mentioned. He mentioned Mr. Epstein was discovered lifeless in his condo on Tuesday.
An expert skeptic, Mr. Epstein wrote greater than two dozen nonfiction books, many involving allegations of presidency conspiracies and company dereliction. Some raised extra questions than they answered.
In an inconceivable begin to a prolific profession, he debuted as an writer early in 1966 when he reworked his grasp’s thesis at Cornell College right into a e-book, “Inquest: The Warren Fee and the Institution of Reality.” The New York Instances referred to as it “the primary e-book to throw open to severe query, within the minds of great individuals,” the conclusions reached by the presidential panel appointed to research President Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.
That very day in 1963, Mr. Epstein had borrowed his stepfather’s automotive and pushed from New York Metropolis to the Cornell campus in upstate Ithaca, N.Y., to attempt to wangle his method again into college after having flunked out seven years earlier.
“All the campus appeared eerily abandoned,” he recalled in his memoir, “Assume Nothing: Encounters With Assassins, Spies, Presidents, and Would-Be Masters of the Universe” (2023), till he encountered a lone pupil, who knowledgeable him of Kennedy’s dying.
Due to a mentor, the political scientist Andrew Hacker, whose class was one which Mr. Epstein had aced, he was readmitted and inspired to jot down his thesis on the assassination. In doing so he gained entry to each member of the seven-man Warren Fee besides its chief, Chief Justice Earl Warren.
His e-book raised doubts concerning the fee’s discovering that Kennedy was killed by a lone murderer, basing them largely on what Mr. Epstein thought-about severe deficiencies within the panel’s investigation. “Inquest” was revealed a number of months earlier than “Rush to Judgment” by Mark Lane, one other in a tsunami of books suggesting that the fee had been hampered by time constraints, by restricted sources and entry, and by Justice Warren’s demand for unanimity to make its conclusions extra credible.
“It was the one grasp’s thesis I do know of that offered 600,000 copies,” Professor Hacker, who now teaches at Queens Faculty, mentioned in a cellphone interview.
A decade after “Inquest” was revealed, the Home Choose Committee on Assassinations performed a way more thorough forensic investigation. Its report advised the potential for a couple of shooter and a potential conspiracy, however concluded unequivocally: “Lee Harvey Oswald fired three pictures at President John F. Kennedy. The second and third pictures he fired struck the president. The third shot he fired killed the president.”
Mr. Epstein accepted the findings, acknowledging that they answered the questions he had raised. “Within the mild of the methodical and open nature of this examination, there was no thriller left,” he wrote.
Amongst his subsequent books had been “Information From Nowhere: Tv and the Information” (1973); “The Rise and Fall of Diamonds” (1982), which uncovered the financial affect of the diamond business in southern Africa; “Deception” (1989), based mostly on his interviews with the Central Intelligence Company’s former chief of counterintelligence James Jesus Angleton; “The Assassination Chronicles: Inquest, Counterplot, and Legend” (1992); and “The Secret Historical past of Armand Hammer” (1996), which detailed ties between that American businessman and the Soviet authorities within the Twenties and ’30s.
He additionally wrote “How America Misplaced Its Secrets and techniques: Edward Snowden, the Man and the Theft” (2017), during which he detailed how Mr. Snowden, as a younger U.S. intelligence contractor, had disclosed tons of of American categorised paperwork to information organizations, changing into one of many world’s most hunted fugitives. Mr. Epstein concluded that in Mr. Snowden’s defection to Russia and speak to with Russian brokers, he was much less a heroic whistle-blower than a prized intelligence asset for Moscow.
Whereas most of Mr. Epstein’s books gained plaudits for his or her meticulous analysis, Nicholas Lemann, in The New York Instances E-book Overview, wrote that the Snowden one was “an impressively fluffy and golden-brown wobbly soufflé of hypothesis, filled with nameless sourcing and suppositional language.”
Mr. Epstein’s memoir, “Assume Nothing,” is affected by dropped names (some 650 within the index, lots of whom he truly knew). They embody Jeffrey Epstein (no relation), the disgraced financier and registered intercourse offender, with whom Mr. Epstein palled round at one level.
In his New York Instances Journal column, William Safire as soon as described Mr. Epstein as “the main author within the grey world of spies and moles.”
He was born Edward Jay Levinson on Dec. 6, 1935, in Brooklyn to Albert and Betty (Opolinsky) Levinson. His mom was an summary sculptor, his father a financier within the fur commerce who died of a coronary heart assault when Edward was 7. His mom remarried, to Louis Epstein, an English-born shoe manufacturing govt, who adopted Edward in 1945. He was raised within the Midwood part of Brooklyn, the place he attended Midwood Excessive College, and in Rockville Centre, on Lengthy Island, the place he graduated from South Aspect Excessive College.
At Cornell, Mr. Epstein was an erratic pupil. He was suspended after the 1956 spring semester for failing 4 programs, though he had obtained good grades in a Nineteenth-century European literature course taught by Vladimir Nabokov and an A in Professor Hacker’s class on the U.S. Congress.
When he returned after 1963, Mr. Epstein accomplished his undergraduate diploma and a grasp’s concurrently, each in authorities. He graduated in 1966.
“He was probably the most fascinating pupil I ever had,” Professor Hacker mentioned. “There was a type of mock ingenuousness about him. He would faux he didn’t know something.”
Mr. Epstein earned a doctorate in 1972 from the Harvard-M.I.T. Joint Heart for City Research, the place his coursework was overseen by Prof. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the longer term U.S. senator from New York.
For 3 years Mr. Epstein taught political science at Harvard, the College of California, Los Angeles, and M.I.T., and wrote half time for The New Yorker. However he determined to return to the town of his beginning to develop into a full-time writer somewhat than pursue a tutorial profession any additional.
“I wished to be in New York, ever since I met Clay Felker,” the editor of New York Journal, he mentioned in an interview final yr with the web journal Air Mail. “He knew the entire world.”
Mr. Epstein lived alone in a lavish rent-controlled condo on Manhattan’s Higher East Aspect. His nephews are his closest survivors.
Below Professor Hacker’s mentorship at Cornell, Mr. Epstein started trying past the Warren Fee’s conclusions to discover how that panel had reached its verdict on the assassination. He was 29, he recalled in his memoir, and had by no means performed a single in-depth interview.
“I had nonetheless not graduated from school,” he wrote. “I had no expertise in journalism. I had by no means even labored on a college newspaper or recognized a reporter.”
But as Richard Rovere, the veteran Washington correspondent for The New Yorker, wrote within the e-book’s introduction: “Right here we’ve one thing which ought to make students proud and journalists envious and ashamed. Mr. Epstein’s scholarly instruments occur to be these employed day in and time out by journalists. However the press left it to a single scholar to seek out the information.”
Mr. Epstein had an insatiable curiosity, writing about something and every thing, from the economics of Hollywood to the rape accusation in opposition to Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the previous head of the Worldwide Financial Fund, by a Manhattan resort maid in 2011. (Mr. Epstein advised that it had been a political setup staged to embarrass him. Mr. Strauss-Kahn and the maid finally settled her lawsuit in opposition to him.)
Michael Wolff, a fellow maverick investigative writer, mentioned of Mr. Epstein by cellphone, “He noticed his job as a journalist as difficult, or, actually, undermining, all standard knowledge, which he did with a rigor born of each deep analysis and of figuring out precisely who to name — as a result of a part of his commerce was to know all people.”
He added: “Ed’s politics had been the joie de vivre of skepticism. Was he proper? Curiously, I don’t suppose he was out to be proper. He was out to ask the questions that others prevented or didn’t consider.”
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